
PRICE, £>0 CENTS. 




%i 


m 


SOME PHASES. 


i 
i 


A REVIEW OF INGERSOLL AND 

1 


HIS 


METHODS. 

... 
| 
i 

i. 


| 


BY OTTOMAR HEBERN ROTHACKER. 




WASHINGTON, D. 0. 
The Hatchet Publishing Company. 




y 


**\ 



BL 2727 
|.R6 
Copy 1 



SOME PHASES 



A REVIEW OF INGERSOLL AND HIS 
METHODS. 




-- 



1^ 



BY OTTOMAR HEBERN ROTHACKER. 




WASHINGTON, D. C. 
The Hatchet Publishing Company. 

1886. 






, 



^ 






Copyrighted, 1886, 

By EOTHACKEE & HELM. 

All rights reserved. 



To 
My Mother, 

Margaret Virginia Roth acker, 

The Exquisite Tenderness and Heroism of whose 

Life B^rou^ht me to a Belief in 

Something Higher than 

the Material 



Guicciardini. — What can we do with the religious ? 
Machievelli. — Teach them religion ! 

— Wai/ter Savage Landor. 



" At Frankfort I once saw a clock," said little Simson, 
"that did not believe in a clockmaker. It was made of 
pinchbeck and kept time wretchedly." — HEinrich Heine. 



See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament. 1 
—Christopher Marlowe. 



"There is an inner, heart contained spirit world which 
breaks through the dark clouds of the bady-world as a sun. 
I mean the inner universe of virtue, beauty and truth — three 
soul worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, 
nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less aston- 
ished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcen- 
dant heavens because they are ever floating before us, and 
because we foolishly imagine we create them, while we merely 
recognize them. — Jean Pa ulRichter. 



Preface. 



What follows is not so much a train of thought as 
a mod of thoughts, seizing what weapons come to hand. 
It is a protest against the manifest narrowness of those 
who are fighting in opposite camps over a great question. 
It is doubtfully submitted as a series of suggestions for 
better and broader minds. In parts of it are incorpor- 
ated extracts from a brochure on IngersolV s methods writ- 
ten by the author some time ago. The attention given 
Mr. Ingersoll is scarcely justified by any prominence he 
will have in the after intellectual histoiy of the mighty 
conflict. It is due rather to his position as the most sil- 
very tongued of the later quacks who have been peddling 
verbal 7iostrur,is in the market-places of unreason. 



Some Phases, 






i. 

HRISTIANITY is at best a narrow word. That 
I 4. which it means has its evidences, but they can 

be expressed neither by type nor tongue. Text- 
peddlers and sign-seekers injure rather than help it. 
It is not a riddle of history to be solved, nor a question 
of meaning to be answered by philolcgy. It is not 
built upon strained constructions of doubtful proph- 
ecies, nor is it a system of curious superstitions and 
demcnological stage effect. One need not prove that 
the day- dawn shadows are what they seemed to be to 
startled eyes in the time when the world was young 
and spoke grotesque words to growing imaginations. 
One need not accept the spectres of the mist as di- 
vinities. A moral economy of the highest type has 
nothing in common with the exaggerations and fright- 
ened fantasies of a cloudy era. It is not dependent 
upon them. To arouse one's incredulity about that 



3 SOME PHASES. 



which is incidental is not a consistent preparation 
for the teaching of a great truth. 

The broader word is religion. It belongs to the 
world as well as to the church. It is catholic and su- 
preme. One must not unlock door after door in the 
c istle of triviality before reaching the inner circle. 
Signs and pass-words, and mummeries and credulities 
are beneath it. It needs no evidences— neither a star 
in the East, nor a light in the sky, nor a voice from 
the clouds. It is a great spiritual axiom — it carries 
its evidences in itself. It does not seek to prove that 
Christ is divine, or that he was simply the greatest in 
the heraldry of human heroism. It does not seek to 
prove anything, but makes itself known in its own 
way. It does not wait upon musty parchments, or 
the age-cricked voices of worn and wrinkled scholars 
for its vindication. If it needed either it would not 
be the light of the world. If it had to be proven by 
research, if each discovered detail had to be checked 
off, if, after all these centuries, it were but a half- 
known system, in which there are many unexplored 
regions, and of which there are many doubtful charts, 
its falsity would stand beyond peradventure. No 



SOME PHASES. 



God ever gave the world a cloud-bank and told its 
tallow- dips to resolve it into sunshine. 

Christianity may be religion distorted by formal- 
ism. It may also be only the formalism. Religion is 
the soul. A man may be creedless who will not be 
crownless. There is a broad distinction between the 
spirit and the pretense. When this distinction is 
clearly comprehended the disbelievers will be the out- 
easts of intellect. 



II. 

CIBNCE should let this subject alone. It is out 
( of the reach of its withered finger-tips. It is 
the Higher Love, and love, cannot be cast into 
a crucible and assayed. It is the province of science 
to deal with that which is exact, and material. The 
spiritual is beyond it. Any intelligent man can be 
taught, by simple demonstration, that the world is 
round ; but the spiritual must teach itself. The some- 
thing which is beyond can only make itself known to 
the individual through the medium of its counterpart 



SOME PHASES. 



in himself. Is it the soil? Who knows? It is the 
intuition which gives relieved recognition to a friendly 
though unknown step on a dark and lonely road. The 
covers of no text-book hold it ; it eludes the searcher ; 
it cannot be pointed out upon a chart. It is the de- 
spair of science because it is as varied as individuali- 
ties, coming to each man only as his soul beckons. 
Why seek it by rule, then, and fret because it escapes 
an exa6l law? Why should science seek to detect the 
Almighty in petty trickery and unveracity by peeping 
through the key-hole of the material world ? Where- 
in is its gospel of geology and its blind groping for 
the beginning of things helped by adding angry attack 
to futile investigation ? It is an easy and ungracious 
thing to call for a prayer- test — to issue an insolent 
challenge to God to prove himself to his creatures. 
This is but an irreverence ; a grave and sacriligious 
buffoonery. As well hold a stop-watch on a star. 
Nature it can compass, but it cannot make the silent 
rocks slander their creator. Science stops on the 
boundary of the material. 

Worse still are the connoisseurs of verities who 
turn a quizzical eye-glass upon eternity. They make 



SOME PHASES. u 



a Cook's tour after truth. They discover with a guide- 
book. They follow schedule time in their sight-seeing 
and misunderstanding progress from principle to prin- 
ciple. They have umbrellas and gum shoes for the 
mists, and shudder in them for the plicid warmth and 
slippered comfort of non-thought. To them the study 
of the Mighty Mystery is a disagreeable summer ex- 
cursion — a season of discomfort which is to be the basis 
of an after sham dilettanteism of liberality. They have 
a smooth, tasteless habit of imitation which is neither 
belief nor unbelief. They carry a grand thought in 
perfumed miniature. They dwarf results and can not 
grasp proportions. There used to be men who 
thought that Brook Farm was the greatest outcome of 
the French Revolution. 



III. ' 

IN this great question the head may sometimes be 
for the prosecution but the heart will always be for 
the defense, and this is a matter of the heart and not 
of the head. Does the divine ideal grow out of an in- 



12 SOME PHASES. 



stinctive egotism in man ? No ; because it is an invol- 
untary humility. Men weary their brains in a confus- 
ing journey through a tangle of doubt and conjecture 
and, whea. they have traversed the wide circle, they 
are back again, humbled and trusting, at a mother's 
knee. The audacity of human pride breaks and the 
earnestness of human assertion which seemed convic- 
tion loses its honesty and, with it, its vigor. Pessi- 
mism is seen to be only the outgrowth of an imperfect 
organization, and the glance back shows that phases 
of opinion were only the reflections of moods. Not 
through the clouds but in the clear sky can the stars 
be seen. 

Thought has its childhood and its incredulities 
and its brutalities. The first savage outburst of 
man's liberation in France banished God, and all good 
things were banished with Him. The serenity of lib- 
erty was distorted into the insanity of license. Free- 
dom saw men as trees walking and struck blind and 
bitter blows. Six centuries revenged themselves upon 
one generation and a hereditary anger, made bitter by 
long suppression, wreaked itself upon a hereditary 
bypocricy made infamous through long power. For 



SOME PHASES. j j 

the union of church and state there was substituted 
the moie terrible union of hate and state. Instead of 
forced orthodoxy there was forced atheism. The in- 
surrection against human wrong which proved a God 
denied the idea which had taught it to resist the wrong. 
The liberated contemned the liberator. Yet, when 
satiated and appalled at the consequences of its own 
bloody irresponsibility, it fell upon its knees, it 
looked beyond the broken architecture of ruined tem- 
ples and met the stern rebuke of the heavens. After 
the fierce rage there came a deep fear. The peaceful 
bells sounded again and the old cure, in whose life 
blended the hopes of all the christenings, the melody 
of all the marriage bells, the sombre sorrow of all the 
funerals — the tenderness of joy and the holiness of 
grief— walked once more through the ancient church- 
yard to God's altar and the nation wrung its hands 
t ,nd cried, Peccavi ! Peccavi ! 

Every serious crisis must have its slurm und 
drang — whether in the mental life of a people or of a 
Tian. Atheism is the vulgarity of a half-taught mind. 
It is an ignorance by rule which seeks to argue with 
an infinity which needs no rule. It is a denial which 



14 SOME PHASES. 

discredits itself by its painful eagerness to justify it- 
self. It is an impertinent unit which assumes that it 
was created to be a beginning and an end. The very 
existence of its theory is its disproof. If man were 
only material he could have no theory. 

Philosophy ends where it begins. After all these 
years its results are on y a waste-b3sket of rejected 
impressions and speculations. The different schools 
are fugues improvised from the same strain. They 
are all meaningless enough in the finality. In spite of 
bravado the serene spirit of the hereafter troubles 
them all, and triumphs at the last. There are always 
times when the spectre is near. In every serious soul 
this idea is planted so deeply and so strongly that it 
will win in the end. Resisted it is a dominant terror ; 
recognized it is a surrender that is also a triumph. In 
either event it will be the victor. 

The " unknowable " is a cant word. Correctly de- 
fined it refers to the failure to deny that which is by 
that which is not. It is the futility of an effort to prove 
that Athens does not exist by traveling away'from it. 
When the circumference is made, and its towers arise 
in the West, the journey will have epitomized the men- 



SOME PHASES. 15 

tal struggle to disprove that which is plain and simple 
by methods irrelevant and confusing. Heinrich Heine, 
the German poet, says in his Confessions-. "How 
4 ' strange ! During my whole life I have been strolling 
" through the various festive halls of philosophy. I 
* ' have participated in all the orgies of the intellect. 
" I have coquetted with each and every system with- 
"out finding content. And now, after all this, I sud- 
denly find myself on the same platform whereon 
"stands Uncle Tom. That platform is the Bible, and 
"I kneel by the side of my dusky brother in faith 
*' with a devotion like to his. With all my learning, I 
"have penetrated no farther than the poor ignorant 
" negro who can scarcely spall. It is even true that 
*'poor Uncle Tom appears to see in the holy book 
" more profound things than I." 



IY. 

FT7HH material search for the origin of things is in- 
& B (9 teresting but fruitless. A learned ant with 
theories about the origin of the earth which com- 
poses the ant-hill is probably a profound philosopher 



i6 SOME PHASES. 



in the ant-world, but if he confines his activity to prop- 
agating his theories he does not bear a valuable rela- 
tion to the winter store. An understanding of laws 
and uses is all-sufficient. If we reject, the divine there 
are only the mist, lefc. No doctrine of evolution can 
successfully furnish a first ciuse or bridge the chasm 
between mind and matter. 

Speculative philosophy is a consistent non-suc- 
cess. It has not disproved religion ; it has not proven 
itself. Tnrough all the centuries it has been in the 
clouds. It attacks its own schools as fiercely as it at- 
tacks religion. It is a squabbling chaos of useless de- 
tail. In its petty groping for a first cause it rejects 
the only tenable explanation — the Supreme Intelli- 
gence. It denies the one probability and muddles it- 
self in an effort to coastru6t a system out of the im- 
possible. When it turns its gaze beyond the sweep of 
the universe, with its manifold forms, marvelous pro- 
portions and inspiring perfection, to seek the secret of 
it all it gives up in despair and says ; " Let us call 
the undiscoverabl* Nature!" Wherein is there any 
progress in this evasion? What evidence of "ad- 
vanced thought" does it show ? It is merely a trick 



SOME PHASES. if 



of avoidance — a confusion of the thing itself with its- 
own origin. 

Parallel it : The advanced thinker sees a kettle.. 
He is profoundly impressed. Sublime speculations as. 
to its origin fill his mind. As a preliminary to the 
solution of the problem he rejects the tinker. The 
tinker does not exist. He is a myth and a supersti- 
tion. The cause fjr tha kettle's existence lies in it- 
self. It is self-creative. It has established its own 
laws and its own measure, yet the inner intelligence 
can not be traced. Taere is much mystification and 
at la3t a burst of light. The kettle is both law and ef- 
fect. The unknown power and the kettle are dual 
yet one. Further speculation is useless and leads out 
into the unknowable. The doctrine of tin-Pantheism 
is established ! What rot ! 

Half-way assumptions and theories will nof 
answer. Confusions are not conclusiois. In so fax 
as the substitute theories are concerned they ask quite 
as much of credulity as it is asserted that religion 
does. One step beyond the material leads out of 
fa6l and into faith. To take such a step and to stop 
this side of the great belief is to beg the entire ques- 



r8 SOME PHASES. 



tion. The longing which aspires beyond the material 
is the soul's instinct. To half-satisfy it is to place 
upon the grave of a great hope artificial flowers. The 
position is as open to the attack of atheism as that of 
religion. It involves a partial and unsatisfactory 
recognition of that which materialism wholly rejects. 
One must either believe or disbelieve. The middle 
ground is a Pantheon of man-made Gods ; a Madame 
Tussaud collection of experimental imitations of divi- 
nity. 

What has latterly been known as the "Religion 
of Humanity " is merely a code of morals. A statute 
book could appropriately be adopted as its Bible. It 
is a faithless, bloodless plagiarism of real religion. It 
applauds the fruit but denies the tree. Its theory is 
tantamount to a deifi nation of man. It is an asylum 
of orphaned virtues deprived of the parent inspira- 
tions. At best it is only a summer holiday substitute. 
It is a placid complacency born of prosperity and a 
good digestion. The simple faith that compasses the 
poetry of the true religion is the happy confidence of 
an infant that can coo in the darkness if it knows that 
its mother is near. Religion is not a system to be 



SOME PHASES. 19 



constructed but a life to be lived. It is not a question 
to be argued but a profound faith to be followed. If 
one does not believe one should not theorize. A new 
myth is no better than an old one. 

Agnosticism is the most logical child of unbelief. 
Laterally it is a serene despair of ignorance. But it is 
nearly as verbose and inconsistent and voluble as the 
others of the brood. Confessing its inability to en- 
lighten it is eagerly wordy in attack upon the beliefs 
of others. Assuming a position that, in the very na- 
ture of things, commands silence, it stultifies its doc- 
trine of non- knowledge by the contradiction of denial. 
To deny one must know to the contrary. If one 
knows to the contrary one can not be an Agnostic. 
Yet it can not lock its tongue. The spcclre of unrest 
keeps it gibbering. It is afraid of itself. The confi- 
dence of thorough conviction is calm ; experimental 
impressions lash themselves into a storm. 



SOME PHASES. 



m 



R. INGBRSOLL is the only great philosopher 
who was ever known as "Colonel" or familiar- 
ly called "Bob." He is the drum-major of the 
army of atheism. He creates a profound impression 
upon the people below stairs. They always crowd up 
to the area gate with loud admiration to see him pass. 
With what dignity he marches through the mud ! 
What florid grace in the sweep of his arm ! What a 
lovely baton! What an awe-inspiring hat ! It is alto- 
gether very splendid and very impressive. The drum- 
major has turned more thoughtless fools into recruits 
than the sergeant with his shilling. 

This man has done much harm. Atheism was 
once the sombre monopoly of unbalanced scholars. 
He has popularized it. Men with strong brains do 
not follow him and therefore he is most dangerous. 
He gives primary lessons in doubt ; penny readings 
in infidelity. He is the apostle of the shallow ; the 
demi-god of amateur thinkers. He is an authority in 
the kinder-garten of speculation. The graces of his 
oratory hold audiences which are above the substance 



SOME PHASES. 2i 



of his speech. He bedizens impiety with pretty 
words and makes a jest of the Mystery. An eloquent 
juggler he attacks truth with trickery. He hides the 
snake under a tropical luxuriance of word-blossoms. 
Distinctly practical he buffets at the form because the 
essence is beyond him. He plays with language in 
that which is essentially spiritual and beyond lan- 
guage. He answers an organ- tone with a jingle ; a 
poem with a gibe. He is a phrase-huckster preaching 
the gospel of unrest ; a Moment brawling at Etc rnity . 
Tracking the finer fibre himself, he has been singularly 
influential in bruising or destroying it wholly in 
others. 

In one sense he is a mental phenomenon. His 
arguments are not new, nor is the basis for his de- 
clamatory unbelief a foundation recently built. He is 
on the same old forum. Voltaire sneered before him ; 
Hume philosophized before him ; Paine railed and 
denounced before him. He is simply a repetition of 
the substance with an addition of tinsel rhetoric. 
They were hard, logical, analytical and sterile. He 
has many musical mannerisms. He covers the hard- 
ness and sterility with flowers of language. He adds 



22 SOME PHASES. 



to borrowed weapons an artificial sentitnentalism. 
Beauty and brutality go hand in hand in Ms mental 
world. The infidelity with which he lures to spiritual 
ruin is a I^ilith. Tested by the intellectual standard 
he scarcely merits mention. Tested by results he has 
been the most dangerous man of the century. His 
influence commands the necessity of serious combat. 



VI. 

TTTHE potency of Ingersoll's position lies in his in- 
& I fe genious avoidance of existing fa<5ts in the prac- 
tical workings of Christianity, and his noisy 
citations of persecutions in the time when church and 
state were one. He confounds the present church 
with the church that was simply a political machine. 
All the faults and follies of men he ascribes to the re- 
ligion of which they were but poor exemplars. He 
attacks that which is by heaping denunciation upon 
that which was. He brings in evidence against this 
generation the tombstones of its ancestors. In even 
this he is not honest. He forgets I,uther, nailing 



SOME PHASES. 23 



against the old church-door at Wittenberg the ninety - 
five theses which constituted the magna charta of men- 
tal liberty. That was a time when ideas leaped from 
rack to rack and from scaffold to scaffold to freedom — 
a time when thought was so young that it had scarce- 
ly learned how to think and only knew that it must 
escape from the old bondage. Surely its just meed 
for the mightiest movement in the history of human 
advance should not be denied to Christianity? Yet 
there has always been over-much of Galileo and too 
little of IyUther in the favorite infidel argument that 
religion persecutes progress. And withal, there has 
also been a consistent disregard of the facl that each 
was persecuted by the same power, and that this 
power was not religion but its false representative. 
The Man of Galilee and the churchmen courtiers and 
politicians are placed on the same platform. Riche- 
lieu was a cold, crafty, bloody diplomat ; therefore 
Christ is a myth or a pretender. The inquisition ex- 
isted; therefore His doctrines are false. This is the 
argument. It does not commend itself to intelli- 
gence. 

An institution must be judged by its power to 



2 4 



SOME PHASES. 



»«« -rib «. pri.cip,,, „ d tea ^'' d «»»»x»- 
-» «<r»rtlo org,.,,, *, spi ,L,f1," , ■"" 

<.e». B r^:;r,h? ,d -r - - « - 

o~ en Ld co„d,„„ Christian! v T„ '"" 

i»5 Une. be.»«„ lhe ,,,J ,„« ,h, , ' *" •"""• 

reason which Mr In. , " ' ""• ""' "» 

•Mrioo i. «o" ,,,7 » S " "" b, " S ° f hi » 

chirch is sometimes avaricious enough 



SOME PHASES. 25 



to accept the one-tenth as a tithe of that which was 
not honestly earned. It is true that pretentious piety 
can hold its temporal own at times against the purity 
which should overthrow it. It is true that the mantle 
of the just has covered injustice and that falsehood 
has been the noisy partner of truth. Yet all these do 
not destroy the pure metal. A counterfeit does not 
invalidate a legal tender. 



VII. 

I I if HEY may deceive but they do not change the 
© I © order and make untruth truth. Those who at- 
tempt it are the victims. Those who suffer it 
are worse if they are willing knaves; their individuali- 
ties and methods are of no consequence if they ate 
merely dupes. The shams in the churches which 
atheism talks of, the wars and the persecutions in the 
history of the churches which it quotes, have nothing 
to do with religion. A church is merely an effort at 
an expression of the truth. If it fails the truth is not 
injured. It is not the less the truth. It is still the 



26 SOME PHAGES. 



expression that is awkward or insincere. Because 
Raphael is copied by a foci is he the less Raphael ? 
Because God is travestied by man is he the less God? 

The argument will not do. One must deal with 
realities and not with their imitations. He must take 
things as they are and not as they are represented tc 
be. There has been bigotry in the church but there 
has been none in religion. There has been persecu- 
tion in the church, but there has been none in religion. 
Persecution is bigotry armed and in action, and big- 
otry is the bastard of belief, but that which is beyond 
it — the great, living truth — can not be held responsi- 
ble. It has not the bar sinister. They are separate 
and should be so held. 

The scornful analysis of the Scriptures which 
atheism delights in making can not be applied in one 
case and ignored in another. To sustain a system of 
unbelief there must be a harmony of method. Justice 
can not charge religion with the wrong-doing of its 
pretended votaries. It must concede that, in their 
wrong-doing, they are guilty of that which is expressly 
forbidden, and, therefore, no matter what their protes- 
tations may be, they are as much the enemies of re- 



SOME PHASES. 27 



ligion as those who openly avow infidelity. Indeed 
they are worse than the latter for their hypocrisy 
makes them sneak-thieves stealing the livery of 
Heaven to serve the devil in. They dishonor a name 
to which they have no right. 

It is not fair to talk of St. Bartholomew's day in 
the discussion ; to take the exaggerated traditions of 
the inquisition ; to recall the record of blood of the 
middle ages ; to cite martyrdoms and imprisonments. 
As arguments against the cruelty and short-sighted- 
ness of ambition and fanaticism they are all effective. 
As arguments against religion the} 7 have no force. 
Doctrine has too often been made a scape-goat for con- 
spiracies of state ; the church has too often been made 
a city of refuge for tainted reputations. Yet the 
Higher Teaching is not chargeable with the effects of 
the lower practice. That which has been done in its 
name by men can not be laid at its threshold. The 
quarrels of creeds, the fanaticism of forms, the asser- 
tiveness of se6t,s, are all supplementary. They are 
finite additions to the infinite. 



28 SOME PHASES. 



VIII. 

I I Jf HE most careless examination of the position of 
® I © atheism shows that it has fashioned the contra- 
dictions in certain texts of the Old Testament 
into its most commonly-used and — as used against 
persons of pliable minds — most effective weapons. 
Hooker has said that ' ' the best things have been over- 
" thrown, not so much by might and puissance of ad- 
" versaries, as through defect of counsel in those that 
" should have upheld and defended the same." The 
application of the observation can be made here. As 
long as it is maintained that the Bible from Genesis to 
Revelations is the inspired word of God in the most 
literal sense of the language ; that those who wrote its 
various books were the inspired and infallible amanu- 
enses of the Almighty ; and that, in all the centuries 
that have intervened from its first delivery to the pres- 
ent time, there have been neither changes nor oppor- 
tunities for changes, infidelity will have an advantage 
which will strike every reasoning mind. And when 
are added to this the confusions and varying defini- 
tions of quarreling sects and commentators, a cumber 



SOME PHASES. 29 



some and self-annihilating proposition is formed of 
the whole which is powerless in logic and condemned 
in the court of common sense. The literal believer in 
inspiration must concede that the Bible as it exists in 
our language is a translated inspiration. That trans- 
lators may err is proven by the results of the labor of 
the revision committee, composed of eminent Chris- 
tian scholars, which has given the English world a 
new version of the Scriptures differing in many im- 
portant respects from the old one. Conceding this 
mu:h he is forced to acknowledge the fallibility of the 
old version, and this opens the casement to the 
broader and more comprehensive view. The moment 
the theory of absolute inspiration is abandoned, and 
the historical portions of the Bible are regarded as 
history, subject to the errors of fact and opinion 
which belong to history, and to the alterations of time, 
Christianity will be on a foundation from whence it 
cannot be shaken. The essence of the deliverance is 
in a sentence from Matthew Arnold : ' ' He (the his- 
11 torian) may give us, in the very same work, current 
11 errors, and also fruitful and profound new truth, the 
11 errors' future corrective." 



jo SOME PHASES. 



The Bible is itself a contradiction of the theory of 
literal inspiration. It is secular history as well as 
spiritual knowledge. It has its stories of wars and 
conquests, of Jewish victory and Jewish defeat. It 
contains a national epic. Is it necessary to maintain 
that this narration of facts is inspired ? These things 
happened and they were written down. For centuries 
they have formed the literature of a race which dis- 
putes the divinity of Christ. Much of it ante- dates 
Him. In its pages the law for His crucifixion was 
found. Against the religionism in it He pitted His sim- 
plicity and genuineness. If it is insisted that the rec- 
ord of the laws, forms and history of Judaism are the 
inspired guides of Christianity they are still binding 
upon the believer. If he accepts all he must practice 
all. The fasts, the sacrifices, the ceremonials can not 
be thrust aside. If what men have given as God's in- 
spired utterances are true, then the old charge which 
has traveled down the centuries and lodged in Inger- 
soll's mouth, that God teaches polygamy, rapine and 
murder is true. If reason is consulted, and these 
passages in the Old Testament are accepted as the nU 
terances of men only, the charge falls instantly to the 



SOME PHASES. 31 



ground. There is no further need to reconcile primi- 
tive Judaism and modern Christianity. 

The answer to the theory of liberal and compre- 
hensive inspiration may be found in the life of Christ. 
His early days were spent in a village under the teach- 
ings of rabbis whose lessons in customs and religion 
were drawn from the records of the people as found in 
the Old Testament. Yet H s entire ministry was a 
protest against the formalism, the caste distinctions, 
the hypocrisy and the cumbersome doctrine which 
were so constantly taught. His life and teachings 
were utterly antagonistic to the interpretations of the 
Scribes and Pharisees, who taught the very things 
from the Old Testament which to-day furnish Inger- 
soll and those of his kind such a rich source of argu ■ 
mentative guffaws and noisy denunciation. Christ 
saw the defecls long before they did, and the realiza- 
tion of it was expressed in that terrible outburst, be- 
ginning : ' ' Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, 
" hypocrites, for ye pay tithe of mint, and cumin, and 
11 have omitted the weightier matters of the law — jus- 
" tice, mercy and fidelity. Blind guides that you are, 
" straining at gnats and swallowing camels." 



3 2 SOME PHASES. 



The New Testament is a record of the birth, life 
and death of Christ, with subsequent detail concern- 
ing the growth of His docVine. These historical 
books approach more nearly the ideal, yet is it neces- 
sary to maintain that even they, colored by the minds 
and varying with the memories of the Apostles, are 
inspired ? By no means. What Christ said is thrilled 
with inspiration. "What the men who read Him by a 
dim light, the men who disputed as to who should sit 
upon the right and who upon His left in the Kingdom 
of Heaven, the men who slept while He cried aloud in 
His agony in the sentient silence of Gethsemane, the 
men who deserted Him at the cross and left Him to 
breathe out the God-life upon an atmosphere tainted 
with jeers — what they wrote with imperfect under- 
standings need not be called inspired. It is of pro- 
found interest but no more. If God had inspired 
them they would not have been cowards and traitors 
in the final moment. 

When this is conceded there will be an end to 
text-mongering by loud debaters. The muck-hunters 
will cease to pick over apparent contradictions and to 
hold a newly -discovered one up in triumph whenever 



SOME PHASES. 33 



it is found. The men who keep their eyes upon a detail 
so closely that they miss the general whole will be less 
notorious than now. Inconsistencies will take their 
proper places as errors of man, and truth will take its 
proper place as one of the "ordered pulse-beats of the 
Divine All." The vociferous declaimers who pass 
from platform to platform as prosecuting attorneys 
with a case against the Almighty will turn to other 
occupations, and Christianity will stand upon a rock 
instead of upon the quicksand which it seems to have 
chosen for its battle-ground. Then the insects upon 
the rosebush will not make one forget the roses. 



IX. 

Ill HERE is a shallow and voluble statement that 
q} I fe the Bible teaches murder and polygamy, and 
that it holds the family relation in light respedl. 
What a curio of misassertion. If it did murders and 
polygamy would be as common in America to-day as 
sunlight, for Christianity is stronger here than ever it 
was in Judea. The Christianity which is taught in 



34 SOME PHASES. 



the New Testament is the Christiarity which was 
preached by Christ against the doctrines of the 
Scribes and Pharisee 5. It is Levitica 1 purity without 
Levitical hair-splitting. It is Essene simplicity with- 
out Essene asceticism. It is spiritual cleanliness 
thrilled with the pulse -beats of divinity. The utter- 
ances of fanatics can not sully it. The blood-stains 
of conquest can not soil it. It is a grand spiritual 
poem instead of a doubtful chronology. What is out- 
side is fragmentary, and it needs no additions. It is a 
harmonious whole in itself. 

It is easy for Mr. Ingersoll to take a passage from 
the Old Testament ordering the sack of a city and 
then dwell upon the pathetic picture of a babe being 
torn from the ' 'thrilled and happy arms cf a mother." 
This has been done often enough before, although not 
in such happy phrase. But there is no argument in 
the position. If Christianity taught this once it would 
teach it now. A record of what was done a score 
of centuries before is not a criticism of the present. 
All the pathos and beauty of the home-circle center in 
Christianity t3-day. What is more exquisite and ten- 
der than a child kneeling at the feet of a loving 



SOME PHASES. 35 



mother, and lisping with sleep-clogged tongue the 
simple prayer which has been taught it ? Mother-love 
and religion are so enwrapped as to be almost identi- 
cal. The child grows in years, and the wrinkles 
gather upon the loving face that had beamed above 
him. He goes out into the world, where there are 
ambitions and hopes and disappointments and realiza- 
tions, unrest and strife — the world in which he is un- 
just, and injustice comes to him in turn — the world in 
which childhood becomes a tender reminiscence, as 
vague as the perfume of a garden in the silence of a 
summer night, and the present grows hard and metal- 
lic. And yet, though the years carry him on and 
away, down devious and narrow paths, the blessing of 
the old tender time is ever with him. The head which 
bent over him then has grown gray ; the voice has 
grown tremulous and tired ; the feet step wearily and 
cautiously down the shadowy declivity, yet the undy- 
ing love still sends its appeal for him to the soul of the 
Undying Love, which, in the form of a Galilean peas- 
ant, walked the straggling streets of Nazareth nine- 
teen centuries ago. This is not born of a doctrine of 
rapine. Is it the scoff of intellectual hardness? Well, 



3 6 SOME PHASES. 



it is tender, nevertheless. Is it a superstition ? Then 
it is an exquisite one. It may be a doctrine of folly 
and falsehood, but it is folly begotten of love and a 
falsehood which is a beautiful idyll. Men may sneer 
at it, but when the sneer comes one can not help 
thinking of the wild, haunting, despairing cry which 
came from Alfred de Musset on his death-bed : 
' ' Poisoned from youth with the writings of the ency- 
clopaedists I early imbibed the sterile milk of im- 
" piety. Human pride, that god of insanity and ego- 
' ' tism, closed my mouth to prayer. How miserable 
" are those men who have railed at that which can 
" save a human soul ! I was born in a corrupt age. 
"I have much to expiate. Pardon, O Christ, those 
" who blaspheme !" 



M 



R. INGERSOLL says that Christ was a great 
man, a manly man, a lover of freedom, but no 
more. That He was enthusiastic, but not in- 
spired. That He was universal, but not divine. The 



SOME PHASES. 37 



position admits of little argument. It is above the 
cackle of the present and the turmoil of petty reason- 
ings. The divinity of Christ must rest upon belief. 
It can not be made the foot-ball of pros and cons. 
The grand simplicity of the life He led, the pastoral 
beauty of His wanderings and teachings along the 
highways and through the by-ways of Galilee, the 
splendid courage with which He taught the truth 
which was to be the light of the world in the face of 
the death that was always near, the marvelous quality 
of universality in His words which make them reach 
to the end of time, the sweet manliness, the exquisite 
justice, the broad charity which marked His every 
step — all these may belong to earth and to man, but 
they have never been repeated in any life which has 
been lived since, nor were they known in any life 
which had been lived before Him. He preserved the 
harmony to the last against temporal and church 
power, and at the end He was the joint sacrifice of 
both. Only in His utterance in the last hours in the 
gaisden is there found anything for the quibblers to 
pick over. When the stern, starless darkness hung 
over the olives of Gethsemane and the disciples who 



38 SOME PHASES. 



1 'could not watch one hour" were asleep, when the 
winds, seeming the voice of that pathetic loneliness, 
shuddered eerily through the shrinking leaves, when 
the Spirit of Dread stood like a sentinel between the 
time that had gone and the morrow that was to be an 
end yet a beginning, when the God-life that had been 
a poem of grace and love and light was wandering 
down the valley of the shadow to the deeper black- 
ness of a tragedy, is it strange that the great sad-eyed 
Soul of Humanity who was both man and God should 
have suffered like the one and endured like the other ? 
It is the accepted theory of free thought that it was 
the fear of death born of the human in Him which 
thrilled through the agony of that wild cry: "Father 
"if it be possible, let this cup pass from me ! " Yet 
may not the profound pity and sorrow that His people 
were about to commit a great and causeless crime 
have forced the words ? Does not the later prayer 
which came from His whitening lips when, with un- 
utterable love, He looked from His dimned and dy- 
ing eyes upon His murderers, and, a mediator in the 
death which was life, cried out: "Father, forgive 
" them, for they know not what they do ! '' support a 



SOME PHASES. 39 



better theory? Perhaps not! They say that He 
was only a ma a. Ah, well ! We are men also. Has 
the word two meanings ? 



XI. 

IHOL,D that the idea that Christ had to become man 
to be understood of man is a conception which is 
proof of the highest inspiration. It was not a mor- 
tal thought. The Jewish dream was a vulgar ideal. 
The Messiah was to come with all the pomp and po- 
tency of temporal power. He was to lift his people 
out of terrors and tributes to glorious heights of 
unity and conquest. He was to be a mighty monarch 
who would build up the waste places and cordon the 
new-born kingdom with victorious spears. It was 
merely a dreatn of empire ; a florid phantasm of ma- 
terial success : an ambition which concentrated 
itself in an extraordinary national egotism. In the 
history of other and later peoples a similar myth may 
be f jund. 

There was nothing in this idea which was not of 



4 o SOME PHASES. 



the earth earthy. At best it was a selfish patriotism ; 
the expression of the eagerness of a scattered people 
for unification and consideration. It involved an 
Oriental indifference to the fates of all the other tribes 
of the universe ; a placid self-confidence in the pos- 
session of a monopoly of Divine favor. There was 
to be a season of summer and of splendor and, after 
it, when the robes of the last Jew swept through the 
gate-ways of Heaven, the doors were to be closed and, 
for the dark clouds of damned souls without, there 
would be only weeping and wailing and gnashing of 
teeth. For the Jew, eternal calm ; for the heathen, 
eternal chaos. Never wa£ there a narrower and more 
abhorrent myth. 

Whatever there is fantastic and imaginative in the 
life of a people finds its firmest faith in the peasantry. 
To them the after time that is to be bright and beau- 
tiful is real and vivid. Amid the squalor of their 
daily walk there is ever the hope of what will be. It 
is a vital longing that grows out of unsatisfied wants 
and the weariness of days of barrenness and bitter- 
ness. It is the one thing which heredity has given 
them — the right to participate in the legacy of com- 



SOME PHASES. 41 



mon glory, and they cling to it with jealous loyalty. 
To them it is never ' ' a dim comet wagging its useless 
tail of phosphorescent nothing across the steadfast 
stars," but a rich largesse of fulfilment but a little 
way beyond. Yet from the peasantry sprang the 
First Gentleman of Eternity— and the phrase is used 
with all reverence — who put aside this mingled blend- 
ing of dream and material desire with strong, sure 
touch and taught, in its stead, the poem of universal 
humanity. 

Is there nothing unusual in this? Is it a mere 
mental phenomenon that this carpenter's son should 
have risen above the vulgar tinsel of the national de- 
lusion and pointed out its true meaning in the religion 
whose absolute purity and completeness compass all 
that is possible in human aspiration towards the high- 
est excellence? Was it simply intellectual breadth 
which enabled him to see the vast spiritual spaces be- 
tween God and the finite, and to supply, in himself, 
the Mediator who was to stand between, and with one 
hand lift the fallen, while the other touched the Infi- 
nite? Was it only a clever trick of self-control which 
enabled him to live a life in supreme and tender har- 



42 SOME PHASES. 



irony with the perfect yet thoroughly practical doc- 
trine of love which he taught? To hold to any one of 
these theories will be to show a credulous confidence 
in the possibilities of human achievment stranger 
than an incredulity in the Divine. It will be to be- 
lieve in a magnificence of profitless imposture, which 
yet had love for all mankind for its motive and which 
walked its splendid path of sacrifice to meet death, 
and died with a prayer for its murderers on its lips. 
And all this from a Galilean peasant! Oh, folly of 
human pride ! 

The miracle of Christ's words is greater than the 
miracle of the conception. The miracle of his resu~- 
redlion of a dead religion is greater than the miracle 
of the raising of L,azarus. The miracle of the marvel- 
ous progress of what he taught, across seas and down 
centuries, is greater than the miracle of his ascent out 
of the tomb. The cross, which was a materi xlized 
shame, has become the emblem of the truest hope. 
Is this but a curious fa<5t in history? The book which 
tells of the peasant is held dearer than that which is 
brilliant with the stories of all the kings and prophets 
of Israel. Is this merely an incident? Oh, unreason- 



SOME PHASES. 4S 



me reason! What veritable strait ing at a gnat and 
swallowing a camel. Never was there such near- 
sightedness of the mind. 



XII. 

WHAT is Mr. Ingersoll trying to do? What 
good results does he expeft to bring about? 
What advance in morals or civilization is to 
be the consequence of his destruaive eloquence ? 

In a confused way he says he is anxious to free 
the world from superstition. There is no palliation in 
this, because he cannot prove that Christianity is a 
superstition. Both the attacks upon religion and the 
defenses of religion rest purely en personal belief. 
There is, on neither side, what is commonly known as 
proof in the legal sense. A violent churchman has 
aggressive faith. A violent anti-churchman has ag- 
gressive unfaith. Noise from one or the other can 
not accomplish anything, because religion can be 
neither expressed nor suppressed by a noise. It is all 
centered in the words. " I believe!" The moment 



44 SOME PHASES. 



one gois beyond this he is in a chaos of doubtful 
reasonings and verbal entanglements. Religion can 
no more be denned than the perfume of a flower can 
be painted. It is as easy to say that materialism is a 
superstition as it is to say that Christianity is a super- 
stition, and the one declaration is quite as forcible as 
the other. On one side there is assertion ; on the other 
there is denial; on neither is there tangible testimony. 
The evidence is all intuitive and eludes language. 
The Christianity which Mr. Ingersoll says is a super- 
stition is the policeman of public morals at the least. 
If it be nothing more than this it has that in it which 
should call for respect.. Its civil influence alone is 
potent enough for good to make its growth desirable. 
If he should succeed in destroying Christianity, 
what then? After he has taken reverence from the 
heart of woman, after silence has succeeded prayer on 
the lips of childhood, after hope has flown from the 
tired brain of age, after the crucifix has been snatched 
from the rapt eyes of the dying — what will he substi- 
tute ? There is nothing left but a doctrine of nihilism 
which may not assert and yet will convey a surrender 
of all moral and intellectual responsibility. Mr. 



SOME PHASES. 45 



Ingersoll is posing as a reformer but, to be a reformer, 
one must reform something. What is there in a re- 
ligion which teaches love, hope, morality and charity 
to reform? He may say that religion is not the source 
of all these teachings, and that they are also in the 
moral code of the universe. But what of this? If the 
moral code is strengthened by a belief which adds to 
the recognized and unassailed amenibility of human- 
ity to civil and social laws an amenability to a higher 
power, ought not the support to be strengthened ? 
The word reform carries in its meaning a pre-supposi- 
tion of a something bad which is to be changed. 
What is there bad in this spiritual assistant of moral- 
ity? 

The truth is that Mr. Ingersoll misuses words. 
He uniforms a Falstaffian company of illogical state- 
ments and ragged and disconnected reasonings in lan- 
guage which was meant for something nobler and bet- 
ter. He incorporates sounding appeals for general 
liberty in his attacks upon Christianity, and people, 
who lack the mental ability to analyze, listen to him 
and are filled with a belief that, in some way or other, 
he has made a point against religion, although they do 



46 SOME PHASES. 



not know just how. They are not able to distinguish 
between a vague impression and a distinct logical 
statement. They get tangled in a thicket of irrele- 
vancies and irreverences. They can not see that the 
Christianity which he assaults is a sham of his own 
building which does not exist. He indulges in rhetor- 
ical diversions which have no bearing whatever on the 
subject. He is essentially deceptive and unfair; a 
sound instead of a sword. His words are the florid 
plumage of the peacock, but the voice with which he 
strives to speak to the inner nature of man is as dis- 
cordant as the voice of the peacock. 

There is one effect, and one only, which he is pro- 
ducing : This is harm. He is the idol of addle- pated 
young men who are deaf and dumb and daft in the 
world of thought. He is the gospeler of little parrots 
who only remember but who deceive themselves into 
a belief that they think. He puts words into their 
idle mouths and they, poor fools, holding the theory 
that to be an infidel is an evidence of intellect, repeat 
them and statueize as Advanced Thinkers. They 
confuse progress with blasphemy, and hold spiritual 
death to be intellectual breadth. Every thief and 



SOME PHASES. 47 



scoundrel in the country regards a le<5ture by Mr. 
Ingersoll as an assurance of comfort and as, to a cer- 
tain extent, a personal vindication. His shallow 
charivari of inconsistencies is a balm to those who 
have most reason to fear a hereafter. 

His do6lrine is strictly one of subtraction. He 
takes away but he gives nothing for that which is 
taken. He destroys, and then mounts upon a broken 
pillar and calls the ruin progress, and liberty, and 
reform, and many other fine names. But the ruin is 
still a ruin in spite of his beatific adoration of it and 
misuse of sounding substantives. And this is his 
triumph. These are his results. Claiming a position 
as a leader in the world of reason, his victories are 
only among those who have but the vaguest notions 
of what reason is. He is not a judge of Christianity. 
He is its prosecutor. With all his glittering phrases 
about womanliness and mother-love, he has made 
more bitter tears flow down the cheeks of mothers 
who have seen the sons they had taught the better 
lesson wander off under the charm of this newer Pied 
Piper of Hamelin than any other man in America. 
He sows his seed of reckless words and the crop is 



48 SOME PHASES. 



pain and unrest. And this, he says, is reform and 
liberty. 



XIII. 

IT has been often said that the life and the doctrine 
of Christ are similar to the life and the doctrine of 
Buddha. Repetition of this error does not make it 
true. It simply shows a lack of information. There 
are resemblances but they are only surface. 

Buddha was a prince. He lived in the languid 
luxuriance of an Oriental court until he became tired 
of life and all that pertained to it. He saw sickness 
and sorrow and death about him and the belief that to 
exist was to suffer became a conviction. All was 
vanity and vexation. Therefore he abandoned his 
magnificence, deserted his wife, assumed the garb of 
a beggar, humiliated himself and went out into the 
world to search for the secret of happiness. For 
seven years he sat under a tree and meditated, and, 
when the seven years were ended, he went abroad 
preaching that happiness lay in utter annihilation, in 
a state of Nirvana in which there was nor thought 



SOME PHASES. 49 



nor action, nor hope, nor fear, nor love, nor hate. 
His heaven is a voiceless void. His reward is a se- 
rene Nothing. He believed in doing good, and he 
taught his belief, but, in this, the resemblance begins 
and ends. His doctrine is a doctrine of skepticism, a 
weariness of life, a dread of action, a repugnance to 
responsibility, an appeal for extinction. The paral- 
lel of Christ and Buddha is drawn by ignorance. 

There are resemblances in all moral codes. That 
which makes them differ lies in the essence, and by 
this must they be judged. And by this standard 
Christianity surpasses all the systems. It has what is 
best in all, and, with it, that which is higher and bet- 
ter than all. In a comparative analysis none of them 
can stand before it. 



XIV. 

UCH is said about the asceticism of Christian- 
ity ; of its chill gloom and sombre severity. 
This belongs to a grimly grotesque past. It 
was a legacy of C ilvinism which is well nigh spent. 



M 



5 o SOME PHASES. 



It was an error of arid blood ; a graft of fatalism upon 
a religion whose spirit is utterly opposed to all that 
fatalism involves. Calvin thought of Heaven as of a 
camp where God stood in sullen power, waiting, with 
quick and threatening eye, to discipline the saints. 
He held a belief of terror and mortification ; of fierce 
concentration and narrow zeal. He was a force grop- 
ing in a fog ; a materialized formalism ; an ordered 
scowl. He preached mercy with clenched fists, and 
taught a love which was only a warmthless winter 
sun with theatrical threats. One of the self-appointed 
constables of the Almighty, he mistook his police- 
man's star for the star in the East. He was acridly 
earnest ; a Protestant El Madhi out of whose nature 
fanaticism had driven all sensibilities. He was a re- 
ligious malaria. 

In his way he did good. He was a marvelous 
propagandist. In his way, too, he did harm. His 
manners and methods missed the best in that which 
he taught. The church was never helped much by 
its Calvihs, its Cotton Mathers and its Jonathan Ed- 
wards. They neutralized their possibilities of service 
by exaggerating that which was repellant and ignor- 



SOME PHASES. 5 r 



ing that which was sunny and attractive. In their 
profound loyalty to the text they lost the thought. 
They were formalists and controversaliasts who 
fought over words. A laugh jarred upon their ears ; 
a sob was a sombre solace. They battled heresy with 
malediction, and gloated in gloomy joy at the Divine 
power to punish. 

But all this belongs far off in history. It has no 
place in the present. The better reading by the 
clearer light has driven away the mists, and the newer 
thought goes back to the earliest time. And there, 
with calm face and serene eyes, is the peasant of 
Galilee. 



XY. 

T pIFE is the child of truth. That which lives 
V through centuries, and resists the attacks of gen- 
erations of hostile intellect, has in it the vitality 
of authority. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur irt 
Mis. Things are plainer than they were and the world 
is growing reasonable. The contraction which bigotry 



52 SOME PHASES. 



urged, has gone out of fashion, and the newer doctrine 
of breadth is more in consonance with what was 
taught by the Nazerene. The centuries have outworn 
the places where He walked and talked. Fertility 
has gone from the fields of Galilee. The populous 
villages which once lined the shores of the Galilean 
sea are ruined and desolate. The fisherman who 
stopped in their hauls to hear His words are dim out- 
lines. The long trains of pilgrims which toiled up 
the steep sides of the Mount of Olives and found the 
first sweeping view of the Holy City, with its magnifi- 
cent temple and glittering architecture, reward enough 
for all the trials which had been endured, struggle no 
more along the paths which their feet had made. The 
gossips who gathered by the wayside and in the shops 
to chatter garrulously of the peasant who called him- 
self the Messiah are folded in the silences. The 
Roman soldiery who lounged carelessly in the tribute 
provinces have gone back to the earth from whence 
they came. The time and its teeming life form a pic- 
ture vague and distant. Past it events have swept. 
New years have been born, grown old, and died, and 
have added many chapters to the world's story. 



SOME PHASES. 5S 



Wars and woes have been thrown heterogeneously into 
the lumber-room of the centuries, covered with dust 
and wrapped in the unrustling mantle of forgetfulness. 
Millions upon millions of lives have walked, hand in 
hand with sorrow and solace, out of the mystery into 
the mystery again. Kingdoms and crowns have risen 
and fallen in the juggleries and jealousies of national 
rivalries, and the glory of one epoch has become the 
hopeless pride of eyes that looked back from another. 
Yet His doctrine still lives. The growth of civiliza- 
tion is its growth. The progress of intellect is its pro- 
gress. The scoffers may cry out at it. Ribald tongues 
may turn the weapons of hate upon it. Hypocrisy 
may stab it under the fifth rib, while heresy buffets it 
in the face. But it is eternal. Above the clamor of 
cant, above the desperate declamation cf infidelity, 
above the tedious twaddle of formalism, above the 
quibbling trivialities of little-brained pretenders — 
sounding clearly through the discordant chorus — vi- 
brates the last appeal which came from the Uncrowned 
and Crucified King, and it is an appeal for them :— — 
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" 



SOME PHASES. 55 



VENENUM IN AURO BIBETUR. 



1. 

The new, white day hath cast its gray, 
And dews and dawn blend sweetly 

In the rich balm of morning air, 
That wraps the world completely. 

Shine bright and warm to-day, O Sun ! 

Of winds be not unruly; 
Fall not, O rains, for to this world 

A little child comes newly. 

Nod, flowers, nod ! dance, sunbeams, dance ! 

Come, Spring, in hoyden beauty, 
And to thy fairest flowers lend 

The wild grace of a duty. 

A new-born soul looks out in fear 

Upon the strange, kind faces 
That circle round the human wail, 

Enwrapped in folds and laces. 



5 6 SOME PHASES. 



And there is One who lingers yet, 
L,ost to world-blinded vision, 

'Tis He who led the toddling steps 
Out of the fields elysian. 



The dear Christ stands, with wounded hands 

Held out in mide caressing; 
And in His eyes the soul of love, 

And in His face a blessing. 



II. 

The soul of June is in a swoon 
Of summer and of sweetness, 

The southwind, drunken with perfume, 
Whispers the day's completeness. 

There is no world at all; this drowse 
Of sense has set us dreaming, 

And fragrance-heavy eyes see but 
A symphony of seeming. 



SOME PHASES. 57 



Smile, red, ripe lips ; smile, morning eyes 
Ring out, O, boyish laughter, 

And greet the dreams that lie before 
The sprites that follow after. 

Iyive lightly now, breathe in the air 
When all the bells are chiming, 

When thy rich blood holds holiday 
And all thy thoughts are rhyming. 

Kiss the sweet time, and, in its love, 

Rest sated and quiescent; 
Let not thy careless fingers strike 

The discords of the present. 

Yet youth is youth, and, in the sun, 
Scolds at the blue sky's coldness, 

And beckons to the far-off world 
With a boy's piteous boldness. 

And still He stands ■, with wounded hands 
Stretched out in anxious sorrow. 

O, White Christy Thou uert once a child / 
O, dear Christ, bless the morrow. 



5 8 SOME PHASES. 



III. 
September's lees, drift from the trees, 

The yellow leaves are sodden, 
And all the pathways, sweet before, 

Are weedy and untrodden. 

There is a grave-damp in the woods, 

Where summer lies a-dying. 
And southward from the shuddering real, 

The fickle birds are flying. 

The loves and hates have lived their lives, 

Grown bright or faded slowly, 
And to the sneering sun are thrown 

The places that were holy. 

And ruby lips grow pinched and pale, 

And raven locks they whiten, 
And feet clog weary on the way, 

And steeper pathways frighten. 

What has it been ? What is it now ? 

This farce of wild endeavor ? — 
This finite something flung in scorn 

Into the vast forever ? 



SOME PHASES. 59 



A cup of tears filled to the brim, 
And beaded, yet, with laughter, 

With little care for aught before, 
Or knowledge of the after. 

A little trust in trembling hands, 

A barren Eldorado, 
An isle of pain around which flows 

A sombre sea of shadow. 

All beaded now, His thorn-torn brow, 
With bitter drops of sorrow, 

But in His eyes the soul of hope 
Doth beckon a to-morrow . 



IV. 

The wind is eerie in the trees, 
The sifted snow is drifting, 

And cold and sullen is the sky 
Where the dull clouds are lifting. 



6o SOME PhASES. 



The river shivers by its banks, 

The sun itself is dreary, 
And the weak steps that find their way 

Are sadly slow and weary. 

And what were dreams so long ago 

Are echoes of lost hoping, 
And what was morn's impetuous tread 

Is twilight's careful groping. 

Yet, murmur waves ; yet, rustle winds ; 

What care we for your chiding ? 
We stumble on in tangled paths, 

But He is all-abiding. 

For there is One who lingers yet, 
L,ost to world-blinded vision ; 

'Tis he who leads the tired steps 
Back to the fields Elysian. 



The dear Christ stands, with wounded liands 

Held out in mute caressing, 
And in His eyes the soul of peace, 

And in His face a blessing. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 226 114 2 






6/^e 3lal4^ 



O. H. ROTHACKER, Editor. WASHINGTON, D. C. 



A Bright, Clean Weekly, Which Deals Honestly and Fear- 
lessly with Public Affairs. 



Comment on Public Men and Public Measures Which is 
Frank and Masterless. 



A National Paper Which Can be Read Aloud at the 
Hearthstone. 



SUBSCRIPTION : 

Per Year - - - - $2 00 

Six Months - - - - 1 00 

Send Fifty Cents, and try it for Three Months. 



THE HATCHET, 

Washington, D. C. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 226 114 2 



